Apple has revamped three quarters of its iPod line. Or, more accurately, it upgraded one quarter, redesigned another, took a step back in time with a third, and left the final, not-even-mentioned quarter alone.
iPod touch
The flagship of the iPod line, the iPod touch, is often derided as being merely an iPhone without the phone …

Epic Citadel

Re: Epic Citadel

Its pretty jaw dropping. On a 3GS it actually looks better than a lot of PC games (World of Warcraft for one). It had the occasional frame skip but when your looking across that vista of an entire castle, mountain and village i think i'll forgive them :)

If anyone is confused, Epic Citadel is a tech demo derrived from "Sword Project" that epic games demoed int he media event. Its based on a derivative on the Unreal 3 engine and epic was pretty vocal about licensing it to developers was their main goal.

rear camera

It seems to take 720p resolution photos

My guess: apps uploaded to the App Store contain a list of flags that dictate which bits of hardware they require to work. One such flag is 'device has a stills camera', another is 'device has a movie camera'. There is no 'device has any camera whatsoever', so if the iPod Touch had become the first iOS device with a movie camera but not a stills camera then Apple would have pushed developers of apps that just need a camera preview (eg, those augmented reality apps that bloggers love) into an extremely tenuous position.

I guess it may also be to do with lower level software implementation issues, especially given that Apple seem to have a lot of difficulty finishing versions of iOS nowadays. There was a prominent section of the keynote dedicated essentially to "we are still going to update the iPad's version of the OS at some point, honest".

Bravo for the back to the future iPod Shuffle

The 2nd gen iPod Shuffle was absolutely perfect for me, until I accidentally put it in the washing machine and it decided (quite reasonably) that it would no longer work.

I could never quite fathom why on earth Apple had to dick around and withdraw it in favour of the inferior 3rd gen Shuffle, so I'm very pleased that they've seen sense and are basically going back to the great clip-on design of the 2nd gen with the new 4th gen model. I only hope that it's got a standard headphone jack - if not, I withdraw everything I said!

And please Apple, don't stop making it again in the future - an itsy bitsy audio player that's great for sticking in one's pocket or taking for a run is just what many of us want, and the iPod Shuffle 2nd gen did it fantastically (and hopefully the 4th gen will do so too).

Re: Bravo for the back to the future iPod Shuffle

Or,

Physical buttons and Accessibility

2nd generation iPod shuffle remains a great design, with the built-in clip, physical buttons you can operate with your hand in your pocket, and the user's own choice of headphones, so I too am pleased to see the design return.

Having the controls on the headphone cable was just stupid, and an lousy excuse to charge exorbitant prices for mediocre headphones. My guess is that Apple noticed a drop in sales when they switched to the 3rd generation.

In my case, I have a multihandicapped daughter who loves music and loves pressing buttons. She has cortically impaired vision. She has a 2nd Generation iPod shuffle plugged into a cheap-as-chips portable handheld amplifier. We've tried her with touchscreens, but her vision is really not good enough. She needs to FEEL the buttons.

So... now I know what she will be getting for christmas - especially if belkin or some such produce a little handheld amp with a neat housing for the new shuffle. The shuffle is cheap enough that we can have several of the things about the house, and she can switch to another one when she wants to hear another playlist.

I often prefer to operate devices in the dark, in my pocket or whatever, without using my eyes. A physical button is still more 'sound' feedback for the fingertips than a short vibration (which affects the whole hand). If they can localise the vibrations on the screen somehow, we might be getting somewhere, but for now...

Touchscreens are an accessibility nightmare for anyone with partial sight or any kind of blindness.

Vendors responsible for their products

If you buy a Ford car with a subassembly made by a third party your recourse would be against Ford.

Likewise, id Apple, or any other vendor, chooses to use designs that are buggy/cheap they get to pick up the bill.

Apple, in my experience, has always tried to dumb things down minimixing costs and quality which has cost some people injury and minor fires. Using these custom connectors lets Apple remain a sole source supplier, read monopoly, and they ae priced accordingly.

Re: "Batteries aren't made by Apple, they are made by suppliers."

That's because nothing's made by Apple

apart from the OS (the hard-to-get-right-bits for which are taken from Unix anyway), Apple don't make anything. iPhones, for example, are assembled by the few Foxconn employees who haven't killed themselves or succumbed to a horrible poisoning yet.

In fairness to Apple...

AC wrote: "apart from the OS (the hard-to-get-right-bits for which are taken from Unix anyway), Apple don't make anything. iPhones, for example, are assembled by the few Foxconn employees who haven't killed themselves or succumbed to a horrible poisoning yet."

They have a pretty good iphone/ipod touch UI which they just may have developed in-house. It is, unfortunately, one of the best I've ever used on a portable device. I really would like to see an open platform built to this calibre with just as slick a UI.

Android and Maemo5/N900 just don't quite come close, imho, but maybe this will come in time.

And nope, I've not caved in and bought a jesusphone yet for objections I have repeatedly mentioned before. I took stock recenlty of the competition, however, and I still feel it ain't quite there yet. So I still wield my old trusty nokia.

(And... you got to ask yourselves where competing products are manufactured anyways...)

3axis accelerometer?

re Megapixels on camera

Possibly they have finally realised that posing a 10mega pixel picture is a waste of time for what most of their users do with it. They either view it on screen or post it to facebook etc where the 0.7MP is more than adequate and because of the technology of image sensors should give a vastly superior picture.

It is about design

It was a pretty clear trade-off between thinness and pixels.

For the third Generation iPod touch last year, Apple wanted to put a camera in - rumours and leaks said this, third party case designers produced case designs with holes in them, prototypes with cameras have briefly appeared on eBay and there is an empty space inside the iPod where the camera was supposed to go. However, Apple pulled it at the last minute because they simply couldn't get an adequate camera into a space that thin. (By their nature, cameras are reasonably thick. You can compensate for a smaller focal length by having a smaller sensor, and that means either smaller pixels or fewer of them. Larger pixels are better pixels, generally).

This year, the iPod is even thinner, so getting a camera in was undoubtedly again a challenge. My guess is that the 0.7MP camera was the best they could do having chosen that thinness. It's going to give reasonable video, and we will see how good it is for still pictures. It will presumably use much the same software as the better camera on the iPhone 4, and that is pretty good by this iteration, with Apple still improving it. If it is good enough for Facebook uploads and the like, it's a worthwhile feature compared to no camera at all.

My favourite part of the presentation

was Steve totally skipping over the Fatboy nano, the demise of which represented a fairly major volte-face at the time, not least because everyone had decried its ugliness solely on the basis of leaked images. Doubtless there'll be a lot of moaning about the touch nano losing its video capabilities: maybe there's room there for a price-drop on the 8GB iPod touch when the 64GB variants emerge to plug the gap?

...Waitaminute. This isn't actually confusing at all! it's actually a lot easier when you're walking along to have one button with three combinations than three buttons each a third of the size. I'm not saying it's the only way to do it - just that it's not, in fact, all that hard.

There are so many things to get annoyed about with Apple, you don't need to try to make up problems that aren't...

WTF

So to go back 4 songs, for example, you'd have to click 12 times?! Or would that go forward 6 songs? Or, even worse, I'm guessing you'd actually have to wait for each operation to complete before repeating? Click click clik, pause, click click click, pause... etc? Tres lame.

Actually no

It IS confusing when a control has mutliple functions, and at the very least it puts greater cognitive demands on the user, because the user has to maintain a 'stack' of presses which is difficult in stressful or cognitively loaded situations. (q.v. "was it six bullets or only five? To tell you the truth, in all the excitement..." - yes even Dirty Harry is not immune to this problem of 'how many times did I operate the control'?).

See my other reply about accessibility. My daughter would have to spend so much time working out the 'code' for the multiple button pushes that she would lose interest totally.

My preference: As few buttons as necessary, but no fewer. One button per function. (I can accept play/pause on the same button, but would prefer that they were seperate).

No, the hard part is...

...using third-party headphones. But why could you possibly want anything but Apple headphones? They never break and the sound quality is top-notch, so you'll never find yourself disappointed with how they sound or having to pay for an expensive replacement you don't like anyway just because ordinary headphones don't work with the device.

Ridiculous.

"If Apple devices were truly magical and revolutionary, certainly it would not be difficult to keep the scroll wheel and also ship with headphones that have controls on them, no?" Isn't this exactly what hey have just done? Ah, so it is!

Primary purpose?

Not exactly...

The primary purpose is portability. The sound quality of an iPod is good enough for the majority of **consumers**. In actual fact at the height of the "iPod have shit sound quality" argument, Apple used the same DAC that was found in most of the competition that was cited as being significantly better (not sure if they continue to do so). There are obviously other options out there and I suppose it comes down to features. The iPod Touch for instance isn't really just an MP3 player anymore; it's an entertainment device--music, video, games etc. You want good sound quality? Buy a player that supports a lossless codec like FLAC. You want really good sound quality? Don't use the supplied headphones with **any** of the devices on the market. Spend a decent sized wad on good quality noise-cancelling headphones. You want really really good sound quality? Don't listen to music on a portable device...

You should be boycotting Sony

Nope

I think you'll find that portability is the primary purpose of portable music devices.

Whilst most people will probably say that sound quality is the next important factor for them, they'll most likely make a buying decision based on other factors such as price, storage and brand image and may not actually listen to any music through the device before buying.

I wanted something I could use in the car and the built-in unit has an iPod connector and full integration that allows the iPod to be controlled from the nice big touch-screen in the dash (as well as the controls on the steering wheel).

As I mostly listen to spoken word stuff like old comedy programmes and audiobooks ultimate sound quality wasn't a factor in my choice of device as the source material is often very poor quality anyway. And as that kind of stuff takes up a lot of space, storage became my second consideration, meaning I ended up with a 160Gb Classic (which is now almost full).

Sony!?!

You must be joking. In my (albeit outdated) experience using the Sony software that comes with their players (anyone rember SonicStage with Network MiniDisc?) you'll have ripped off your ears in frustration before you get around to listening to any music. That's quite detrimental to percieved sound quality I understand.

If you're really worried about the sound quality (like I am) then you know that actually the lineout signal that you can take from the dock connector (I've soldered up my own lead) is actually up there with some of the best when fed into a reasonable headphone amp.

If you want the pinout for the lineout google for it and go the the pinouts.ru link. Off the shelf products are also available for the less solderly-minded.

Paris - because she too sure has made herself a homebrew miniture-pentode headphone amp with a dock connector...

Why?

Why do you or anyone else need a portable music device? Do you not have a cell phone?

My cell phone isn't flashy, that new, or cool. On the other hand, it gets everything done and never drops calls no matter how I hold it. I have a Blackberry Curve 8330 on Sprint. I can put an SD card in it to hold 32 gig of music (64 gig if I mod the phone to support it). I have a Pandora app that syncs with my desktop account so I can stream music commercial free wherever I go. In my car I have an FM transmitter so I can plug into my phone's headphone jack and broadcast to ANY radio station I want. When I get out of the car, I can plug in high quality headphones and keep listening to the same music seamlessly.

Why would anyone buy an MP3 player, when you can get a phone that does the same for often times less money?

Apparent Answer: because their phone isn't on AT&T and they love humping Steve Jobs. There is no rational explanation.

Digital Camera and MP3 Players are interesting... because they have no purpose. They should not exist anymore. There is no point to either device. If you want a portable music device, the only rational reason to get one is if you are going to get a very high quality device (which rules out Apple). The only reason to get a digital camera is if you're going to get an SLR or D-SLR. Otherwise you can get the same quality on a cell phone.

That is why Apple had to get into phones, their only successful product was an MP3 player, and there was no point in having an MP3 player.

Here's my why...

"Why do you or anyone else need a portable music device? Do you not have a cell phone?"

Yup, I do have a cell phone. It's for emergencies and important stuff. I don't want to drain its battery playing games, taking (crappy, at least on my phone) pictures, browsing the web and listening to music and then, when I need to call or text, I can't. And I only call or text when it's important. Because I hate phones. Apparently my phone is capable of playing music, but I've never tried. I did try the camera. It's shit. I'm a photographer and I can't accept that quality even for unimportant stuff. Of course I don't carry my SLRs around unless it's a photo outing -- I just leave an old point and shoot Canon in my backpack for everyday needs. Cheap, small enough to be unnoticed (could even be in a coat pocket), and takes pictures with a quality that cell phones can only dream of. Maybe now one can buy an expensive cell that actually takes good pics as good (without the crazy noise, aberrations, and compression), but sure as hell the cheap ones can't.